![]() ![]() ![]() The fight against hunger, which was one of the SDGs that was yielding the most results, took a hit. But closing schools also led to an increase in malnutrition.Ī: We don't generally realise it, but there are at least 380 million children in the world who depend on school canteens for food. Many children ended up entering the labour market and being exploited. Distance learning has helped a lot, of course, but it has also increased inequalities: in many countries, a home computer or Internet access is not yet available to everyone. Q: Even younger people are suffering: the impact on education, for example, has been significant.Ī: Yes, the pandemic has increased the number of early school leavers multifold. We’ve been talking about it for the past year and a half, but we’re now starting to see its impact on life expectancy, which has decreased everywhere, also because COVID-19 has affected the vulnerable and the elderly in particular. Then, there is of course also the pandemic. In addition to unemployment, fragile unemployment has increased as well, affecting those millions of people who have a job, but whose salaries are too low to maintain a decent standard of living, like paying for rent, health care, schooling for their children, etc. For many of those affected, there was no recourse to welfare mechanisms or social protections, because they worked in the informal economy. Not only has the number of people living in extreme hardship increased throughout the world, meaning those who at one time made up the middle class, but many of them, especially women, have lost their jobs. “The pandemic has set us back on many fronts”, Ponti replies. But now, where are we? What kind of impact has the devastating COVID pandemic had on the roadmap? Or, at least, to make considerable headway in finding solutions. We codified these issues in 2015, and we gave ourselves 15 years to fix them. The climate, labour and gender equality are also part of this list. With offices in Bonn, Germany, and a global outlook, the UN SDG Action Campaign is the ideal lookout to perform a check-up on the list of problems that the entire world has identified as priorities: from hunger to education, clean energy and responsible consumption. Marina Ponti, who hails from the Milan area and whose CV is split between NGOs and the UN, where she began working in 2001 after leaving Mani Tese, is the director of the SDG Action Campaign, a special initiative of the Secretary General of the United Nations which promotes the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda. We have the opportunity to imagine a different future, to remake it. “We’re at a turning point for people and the planet, as is said by the UN SDG Action Campaign. ![]()
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